As my friend James has mentioned in the Camera Rumors round-up, it's Pumpkin Spice season (scary how fast time flies, huh?) Personally I'm trying to drop a few pounds, so it was black Americano when I went to the DroneX exhibition last week.
In the few hours I was there it was interesting to experience the mix that the industry has become. The first two stands in the hall were 'Hobbyking' and a Ukraine-focussed defence company.
In truth the former is more of a name; these days the electric motors on sale are not just the kind used to build FPV quads. It was also interesting to see the name Sony prominently, but not DJI (save for on other exhibitors' stands) nor Autel. Sony's prominence had a lot to do with Visual Skies, where I learned a bit about the making of Ridley Scott's Naoloeon – worthy of a separate story!
Ther other big set piece last week, with reverberations that continue, was Skydio's annual event which took place the same evening on the other side of the Atlantic.
Most interesting for the average user was not the impressive developing tech on display for coordinating fleets of X10 autonomous drones, but the comments of CEO Adam Bray about the accusations of the company's lobbying against free trade (and, especially, DJI).
Since my piece on warnings of pain for DJI owners in America, I've received some emails either parroting Bray's point that DJI is spending more on lobbying (true) or trying to show me that DJI is lobbying on defence. The thing is DJI have to lobby on defence even to protect their consumer market as the legislation threatening the company is categorised as 'defence' legislation; when I put this to the would-be 'source' they simply referred to the usual online data repositories and other unsupported vaguiries.
So Skydio's "Everything Changes. Again." turns out to mean very little in the short term, but Bray might be right about the long-term move to regional drone industries and since Skydio seems to have no interest in consumers or even photographers we can hope someone else might.
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Perhaps, though, as I report elsewhere, the US government might finally be realising just how much switching away from DJI & Chinese drones is costing it (and by extension taxpayers) thanks to an auditors report.
Those hoping for a DJI competitor should look instead at HOVERAir, where the IndieGoGo campaign has passed 6250 backers for the 8K model.
• IndieGoGO HoverAir X1 Pro campaign page
That's a pretty high-end alternative to the no doubt very Christmas-friendly DJI Neo. We're still waiting to learn more about – new, cheaper goggles which might make FPV more palatable for the wallet as the holiday season approaches – we'll discuss that on the rumour list's DJI page...
There are also a lot of rumors, about an upcoming update to the top-tier folding drone, the Mavic 3 Pro – a Mavic 4 (more on the next page) – and an Air 3S box has been photographed, so the next few months could be at least as busy.
Interestingly 'beyond line of sight' tech is also being normalised for drones as small as the Mavic 3, which I'll be posting about in the next few days.
What about the other big names in drones? As I mentioned Parrot drones have been returning to French roots this September, 3D-modelling the Palace of Versailles in the company's largest project of the kind yet.
What of DJI? Turn to the next page...
